Installation

Starting with Java lets us start (relatively) small and add only the plugins we need.

We could (used to) start with the Classic package, but that's been hidden away on another page.

Double-click on the downloaded tarball to unpack it.

Rename the unpacked eclipse directory as Eclipse/4.3 (or whatever the corresponding version number is).

Move the Eclipse/4.3 directory into Applications.

Drag Eclipse.app from the Eclipse/4.3 directory into the dock.

Start Eclipse.

When prompted for a workspace, select ~/Work/Eclipse Workspace.

Check the box to set this as the default workspace.

NOTE: If you've got Gatekeeper set to its default strictness level ("Mac Store and identified developers") then the first time you run Eclipse, you'll need to right-click and choose Open, instead of clicking directly on the icon. This will let you override the Gatekeeper setting.

Plugins

Eclipse has a ton of plugins available. Even most of the core functionality is actually implemented as plugins.

Web Developer Tools

Web Developer Tools helps provides tools to work with HTML, XML, and JavaScript.

Remote System Explorer

Select General Purpose Tools / Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime and hit Next

Confirm the components to be installed and hit Next

Agree to licenses and hit Finish

Hit Restart Now when prompted

ShellEd

ShellEd provides syntax highlighting for UNIX shell scripts.

Help » Eclipse Marketplace…

Find: shelled

Click on Install for ShellEd

Confirm the components to be installed and hit Next

Agree to licenses and hit Finish

Hit Restart Now when prompted

Toad

The Toad Extension for Eclipse lets you work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle databases. It allows you to query and view tables, and helps you to build queries.

Help » Eclipse Marketplace…

Find: toad

Click on Install for Toad Extension for Eclipse

Confirm the components to be installed and hit Next

Agree to licenses and hit Finish

Hit Restart Now when prompted

Configuration

General

We want to ensure that files are saved in UTF-8 encoding, with UNIX-style line endings.

Preferences

General

Workspace

Text file encoding: UTF-8

New text file line delimiter: Unix

Tip: To convert existing files, select them in the the package explorer and select File / Convert Line Delimiters To / Unix from the menu.

HTML

Preferences

General

Compare/Patch

CHECK Ignore white space

Editors

Text Editors

CHECK Insert spaces for tabs

CHECK Show line numbers

CHECK Show print margins

Print margin column: 120

Web

CSS Files

Encoding: UTF-8

Editor

Indent using spaces

Indentation size: 4

HTML Files

Encoding: UTF-8

Editor

Indent using spaces

Indentation size: 2

XML

XML Files

Encoding: UTF-8

Editor

Indent using spaces

Indentation size: 2

Code Formatting

We want to ensure that the last line ends with a newline character. This helps with some text-processing command-line tools, and also ensures that when we go to the bottom of the file, we're after the last line.